WASHINGTON
- With the scandal over the abuse of prisoners in US
military custody in Iraq still growing, the
administration of President George W Bush appears to be
shaken to its very core.
While the immediate
question is whether Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
could be sufficiently persuasive in congressional testimony scheduled for
Friday to survive the fast-spreading calls for his
resignation, the larger issue has abruptly become
whether the US occupation of Iraq, for which the
administration has just asked an additional US$25
billion (also covering operations in Afghanistan) this
year, is sustainable.
That question was put
front and center on Thursday by Representative John
Murtha, a conservative and highly influential Democrat
close to the Pentagon. In private meetings this week, he
reportedly told fellow Democrats that the war was
"unwinnable" and on Thursday issued a blistering attack
on the Bush administration's strategy and
"miscalculations" on Iraq.
"We either have to
mobilize or we have to get out," Murtha declared in an
emotional press conference in which he disclosed the
content of a series of written warnings he had sent to
Bush and other top officials since his first of many
visits to Iraq since last September.
"Today our
forces in Iraq are undermanned, under-resourced,
inadequately trained and poorly supervised. There's a
lack of leadership, stemming from the very top," he
said, adding that the most recent scandal should result
in resignations "right up the chain of command".
Murtha's fury reflected a growing sense that the
administration, whose internal splits are now more
apparent than ever before, has lost its way in Iraq.
This is a point underlined by the unexpected request for
$25 billion more - bringing total spending on Iraq and
Afghanistan since 2001 to $191 billion.
That the
Bush administration has very little idea about what to
do was made clear by the news - printed in bold across
the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York
Times - that Bush had "privately" scolded Rumsfeld for
not warning him about the photographs before they were
broadcast.
While Bush insisted on Thursday that
the defense secretary will "stay in my cabinet", the
fact that White House officials, presumably with the
president's authorization, briefed reporters on the
"private" dressing-down was unprecedented.
It
also encouraged Rumsfeld's State Department rivals to
pile on. State officials, who were also furious that the
Pentagon had kept them in the dark about its own
investigation, told reporters that they had repeatedly
warned Rumsfeld and his top aides about problems
relating to detainees, not only in Abu Ghraib prison,
but also in Afghanistan and at the detention facility at
the US Navy base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"It's
something [Secretary of State Colin] Powell has raised
repeatedly - to release as many detainees as possible
and, second, to ensure that those in custody are
properly cared for and treated," a "senior State
Department official" was quoted as telling the Post.
But Rumsfeld, an experienced bureaucratic
infighter, was not entirely defenseless. Without quoting
a source, the Los Angeles Times reported a few hours
after the Post went to press that Rumsfeld had been
informed about abuses at Abu Ghraib in January and
personally told Bush about them shortly thereafter.
That in turn led to embarrassing questions at
the White House briefing on Thursday about what Bush had
done with that information. The questions echoed those
raised by the revelation just a few weeks ago about what
the president had done after hearing an intelligence
briefing on al-Qaeda's intention to hijack airplanes
inside the United States one month before the September
11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Both the White House and Rumsfeld are now
insisting that they had only been told about the abuses
orally and had never seen the photographs until CBS
Television's Sixty Minutes II broadcast them last
week.
Whether that explanation will suffice to
contain the scandal, however, is highly doubtful,
particularly in light of reports that the photographs
may only be the tip of a very large iceberg.
In
an interview on Fox News on Wednesday night, Seymour
Hersh, the investigative reporter who broke the prisoner
story in The New Yorker, predicted that "it's going to
get much worse. This kind of stuff was much more
widespread ... I can tell you just from the phone calls
I've had in the last 24 hours ... there are other photos
out there ... There are videotapes of stuff that you
wouldn't want to mention on national television ..."
Hersh based his prediction largely on the
53-page report by Major-General Antonio Taguba, parts of
which have remained classified. He investigated the
abuses beginning in January, when Rumsfeld was first
informed about them, and finished his report in early
March. The report put much of the responsibility for
what had taken place at Abu Ghraib prison on the
application of interrogation tactics used against
Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo against
captives in Iraq and Afghanistan itself.
The
fact that Rumsfeld - who had the time to attend a
festive black-tie dinner of the White House
Correspondents Association Saturday night, two days
after the photos were first aired - admitted to not
having read the full report as recently as Wednesday
this week has emboldened those, still mostly Democrats,
who are now calling on him to resign.
But
Democrats are not alone. Republican lawmakers have
privately told reporters that they are fed up with
Rumsfeld's arrogance and inflexibility, particularly on
the issue that Murtha is most angry about - the
administration's failure to provide more troops to
secure Iraq, and their own safety, both during and after
the invasion.
Several leading Republican
lawmakers, including some who are considered very close
to the White House, also complained bitterly about not
being informed about the abuses or the investigation in
advance.
Murtha, a decorated Marine veteran and
senior member of the sub-committee that deals with
Pentagon appropriations, poured scorn on the
administration's optimistic predictions about Iraq.
Without explicitly stating that the war was
"unwinnable", he at one point said the public had turned
against it and that it was unlikely the administration
would provide the troops needed to stabilize the
situation to such an extent that other countries would
be willing to help out.
While Murtha's angry
defection created shock waves in Congress, a stunning
attack on Rumsfeld by the generally hawkish Washington
Post spread through the capital with unaccustomed force.
Titled "Mr Rumsfeld's responsibility", the lead
editorial of the Post put the blame for the abuse
scandal squarely on his shoulders by arguing that his
policies on incommunicado detention and refusal to apply
the Geneva Conventions have created a "lawless regime in
which prisoners in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been
humiliated, beaten, tortured and murdered - in which,
until recently, no one has been held accountable".
Rumsfeld's statements since the disclosure of
the abuses, moreover, suggested that "his message
remains the same: that the United States need not be
bound by international law and that the crimes Mr Taguba
reported are not, for him, a priority. That attitude has
undermined the American military's observance of basic
human rights and damaged this country's ability to
prevail in the war on terrorism", the Post observed.
testimony scheduled for
Friday to survive the fast-spreading calls for his
resignation, the larger issue has abruptly become
whether the US occupation of Iraq, for which the
administration has just asked an additional US$25
billion (also covering operations in Afghanistan) this
year, is sustainable. 
